Mary Eberstadt has been treated shamefully by First Things . Well, maybe that’s a little strong, but she wrote a very important book called Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes , and it has never been featured in First Things ’ . . . . Continue Reading »
Well, now, here’s something. In Holland, the federal orthographers¯and contemplate for a moment what it means to a nation to have official spell-checkers, employed by the government and armed with police powers; maybe they say "Just the vowels, ma’am," or "My name is . . . . Continue Reading »
Columnists say it should be irrelevant, and then go on to discuss it at length. I’m not at all sure it is irrelevant. It reflects a very major change in American public life. Of course, the Constitution prohibits a “religion test” and therefore it should be irrelevant to whether . . . . Continue Reading »
Catholics are reminded that this is All Saints Day, a holy day of obligation. If you haven’t been to Mass yet, there is still time. You say it’s thirty miles away? Inconvenience does not negate but sweetens duty. So here we go again. This time, however, it seems likely that the great . . . . Continue Reading »
My, my, but aren’t we important. A few years ago a bishop remarked about a Catholic academic who blamed all the troubles of the Church on the fact that the bishops had over the years been ignoring his advice, “Father ________ suffers from a severe case of self-referentiality.” . . . . Continue Reading »
Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination to the Supreme Court, which is almost certainly for the best. Her statements in the early 1990s, unearthed earlier this week, drove in the final nail. Until then, social conservatives could tell themselves that, although she may not be possessed of a great . . . . Continue Reading »
Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in six words, which he did. (I’ll get to what he wrote.) Black Book magazine issued the same challenge to a slew of well-known contemporary authors. Norman Mailer wrote this: "Satan ¯ Jehovah ¯ fifteen rounds. A draw." . . . . Continue Reading »
RJN: The Hemingway is good, but then his prose always did move toward compression. The "short-short"¯a short story of no more than a paragraph, and often only a sentence¯has emerged as a genre in its own right over the last decade, particularly among mystery writers, who always . . . . Continue Reading »
Wellington Mara’s father bought the Giants football team in 1925, and the son stayed with it for eighty years. Wellington Mara died Tuesday at age 89. I did not know him well, but those who did testify to his being an extraordinary gentleman of the kind that seems increasingly rare. He was a . . . . Continue Reading »
John Keegan, the eminent historian of warfare, writes that the trial of Saddam Hussein poses difficult questions of law and morality. Saddam may be responsible, as seems to be the case, for as many as a million deaths. He ordered mass killings of Iraqis, and hundreds of thousands were killed in the . . . . Continue Reading »
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